Project leader: Moritz von Brescius
 

Moritz von Brescius’ new research project explores the politics of resource overconsumption.

The project examines the origins of the excessive consumption of resources in the 20th century using the example of tropical and synthetic rubber in their constant competition with other commodities. The project uses the industrial “Battle of Materials” as a perspective to trace the emergence of a momentous mindset: the invention of the supposed “underconsumption” of raw materials in the 20th century. The work traces the rise and power of the research and development (R&D) complex and examines how private commodity producers, governments, corporations, research institutes, and marketing experts in Europe, the US, and their colonies sought new applications and markets for raw materials – especially in times of economic crisis and overproduction. The project shows how various actors promoted rubber as a versatile material, contributing to material path dependencies, a surge in resource overexploitation, and the “Great Acceleration” of human impacts on global environments in the 20th century.

Commodity Waste, Toxicity, and the Circular Economy

The postdoc project relates to WP 2: “Commodity Waste, Toxicity, and the Circular Economy”. This project addresses the issue of commodity waste management and particularly recycling as a means of maintaining resource consumption at maximum levels even during supply shocks. The project will use the model of the circular economy to analyze what happened with modern consumer products and the huge industrial waste of hardly biodegradable scrap in times of both war and peace. It tackles the history of large international recycling industries since 1900 (esp. rubber) that navigated shifting global conjunctures of scarcity (as during military conflicts) and periods of material abundance and price slumps. Reuse and reprocessing are explored as the flip side of exponential commodity consumption in the last century. The WP also addresses the issue of coming to terms with modern materials' long-unknown toxicity, which provoked (ongoing) societal debates over the possibilities of their reuse/repurposing as part of the built environment. The growing awareness of industrial commodities’ toxicity also mobilized civil society actors and environmental protest and advocacy groups, whose challenges opened up another “front” in the commercial “battle of materials”. While cornucopian beliefs in unlimited growth and the infinite possibilities of modern industrial science and technology represented one powerful mindset of the “Great Acceleration”, environmental anxieties and the search for less harmful material alternatives represented an increasingly important counterpart to the mass consumption of resources in the 20th century.

20th-Century Commodity Marketing and Propaganda, with a regional focus on western Europe and its colonial possessions

The project consists of three distinct but interrelated work packages. The PhD position relates to WP 1: “20th-Century Commodity Marketing and Propaganda, with a regional focus on western Europe and its colonial possessions”. The WP uses heuristic methods (textual analysis, visual history, material culture studies) and insights from modern-day marketing to explore in depth how commodities such as rubber, (early) plastics, and other materials became entrenched as modern industrial commodities and came to fulfil a wide range of every-day functions in the fabric of modernity. The project will focus on the different people and practices employed by companies, producer organizations, and resource institutes to research, lobby, and market novel organic and/or synthetic materials for a wide range of applications, including the specific cultural connotations of materials that “nature forgot to make” and the consumerist lifestyles they have made possible. The focus will be on different media (film, exhibitions, posters, magazine advertisements, radio and television broadcasts) and may also include the increasing targeting of consumers in the countries of the so-called “Global South” in the period c. 1900–1980.